Do you know Hello Kitty ? this nice little cat from Japan having "kawai" adventures ?
Do you know Chtulhu and Lovecraft's gothic horror universe ?
Well, here is a funny mix of both !
http://www.hello-cthulhu.com/?date=2003-11-30

Friday, November 12, 2004

also concerning "always on, everywhere!"
here is the news from SF....
And what have you seen recently that's interesting?
james

**************
"October 27, 2004

The end of the hot spot
Already famous for his backing of same-sex marriage and his wife's recent overshare, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is finally making tech headlines instead.
"We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service," Newsom said in his state of the city address last week. "Every San Franciscan" equals about 740,000 people in 46.7 square miles. Beyond being a generous offer from the mayor, the announcement points to a fundamentally more useful way to think of Wi-Fi: hot spot-free and seamless .
When Wi-Fi is seamless, everything changes. You won't have to screw with glitchy, goofy, 3G cell phones for a data connection on your hip. A device like a Treo becomes much more useful. And instead of using a cellular phone, you might just run VoIP software on a Wi-Fi PDA. Tasty.
The cellular carriers and phone makers have been overpromising 3G for so long, I'd love it if we just skip right over it as consumers. Besides, digital cell phones sound so bad, VoIP on your hip has to be an improvement in audio quality.
With seamless Wi-Fi, the in-car radio business could really be turned on its ear. I've spoken to several start-up stage firms that want to make Wi-Fi the new car radio, opening up your commute to thousands of interesting Webcasts instead of the tedium the major broadcast companies have made radio. I'd love it if we could shove those 22-minute commercial loads and junk syndicated content right up their greedy, overleveraged, Wall Street-beholden asses.
And finally, seamless Wi-Fi will also improve our appreciation for coffee. You'll actually be able to find a place to sit at Starbucks once the high-tech hoboes realize they can get a Wi-Fi connection somewhere else.
"

Thursday, November 11, 2004

It's great to have 100Mb to store data for Netclass presentations.
But how to use a FTP client (LeechFTP or CuteFTP for example) to upload and delete files on a server?

In fact, if you are not in Supelec, a FTP client is not mandatory to upload or delete files on the free.fr account : you may just write this command in the adress bar of your internet browser :
ftp://login:password@ftpperso.free.fr (where you replace "login" and "password" by your own information)
But it's not really a good idea, as it requires a lot of resources.

Finally, an another solution can be found here : Free is currently developping a web interface to access to FTP accounts. It is very useful & user-friendly.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

http://www.irobot.com/consumer/

These robots vacuum by themselves. They can detect walls. They will calculate a map of your room and vacuum it entirely. They will go under your bed where it is usually very hard to dust. I think I need one of those!

Free software, particularly operating systems, are now quite "fashionable" in the industry. Many people think that thanks to Linux and other open source and free software, they will save money. It's obviously right for you or me, but for a company, the problem is slightly different. A few studies showed that a complete switching from Microsoft environment to Linux system is likely to be very expensive for a company which has always been running Microsoft software : this article or this one will give you a few details. However, this is a very hot topic, and surveys can sometimes be questionable. (OK, I know this article is taken from The Enquirer ...)

Indeed, evaluating the different costs linked to a computer system is really difficult : switching from Microsoft system to Linux implies a great need of expensive training. Fortunately, the question is far simpler for individual users like us : testing free or open source software will not cost you anything ;) And you do not need hours of training to use Firefox, for example ...

Monday, November 08, 2004

In a Slashdot news, we can find back our friends nerds from Novell and Microsoft that were "acting" in the nerds video documentary last two weeks : "This morning Novell announced that it had settled a potential law suit with Microsoft related to its NetWare product line. Microsoft agreed to pay $536 million to Novell, but this is not the end as there is another litigation against them pertaining to WordPerfect." By the way, with WordPerfect, we are again going back to the great time of the beginning of this "nerds adventure". The affair is available in details at this address.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

If you miss the old mp3.com and if you want to discover new music,
check out this site : www.soundclick.comIt offers streaming audio and free music downloads from well-known artists and, which is the most important : unsigned bands.
The site currently is adding more than 40,000 songs each month, and over 5,000 bands.
(Currently there are 777,752 songs and 128,428 bands)
For musicians, Soundclick offers a free artist page, a gig calendar, and most importantly, unlimited song uploads. This is one of the best free sites for independent musicians to promote themselves.

On the CNN site, you can find every results about the us election (president, senate,....) for each county, with very interesting figures such as:
- who did the church attendants vote for?
- who did the hispanic women between 30 and 45 vote for?
- how many men voted for Bush in Pocahontas (Iowa) ?
....

Watch Live TV broadcasts on the Internet.: "Your broadband Portal to watch live TV broadcasts and on demand TV broadcasts on the Internet
(wwiTV.com is an index to streaming media available on the web)
Travel to 3000 live feeds and on demand video & audio streams

This should interest our Russian participant, Gallina! There are several Russian streams!

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Antoine managed to set up a very good wiki page, so I would like to post a few links about this technology.

This first link deals with wiki being a very convenient way to share datas in companies. It's easier to set up than huge programs like Lotus Notes, more resistant to viruses than e-mail and easy to use. However, good access control is needed in order to avoid spam or data loss. But on the other hand, these constraints are also a good way to make people aware of their responsibilities and to motivate them !

This second page was extracted from a teacher's blog who experimented wiki in school thanks to software developped by himself. The article is quite technical, but to put it in a nutshell, Frank Carver discovered that wiki pages can lead to simultaneous edit problems because when using it in class, the system is very likely to be overwhelmed with requests. He is also working on differents methods to properly manage the problems created by simultaneous edits.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Coding a wiki site by myself was (is) unthinkable. That's why I was looking for embedded solutions to create a free wiki site.
www.seedwiki.com provides good solutions, tested with the great help of Didier. Other possibilities here.

Here are the parameters of the accounts created (one @seedwiki, one @yahoo.com) :
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
first name : netclass
last name : supelec
Email : netclass_supelec@yahoo.com
password : benenson (deserved tribute ;-)name of the blog : netclass
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each page of the wiki may obviously be edited (click on "edit page", upper left menu). Write what you want, yhen click on "Save changes".

Mistakes don't cause big problems, as anyone may correct them, and even publish again an old version of the site if it was cleared. Go to "versions" (left menu), click on the date you want to go back, then click on "edit page" (left menu) and finally "Save changes".

To create a new page, just write [TitleOfYourNewPage] in the page you want the link to YourNewPage appear.

If you create an account @seedwiki (it's completely free) you gain access to admin options, you can see reports about our pages and modify settings. But obviously, you don't need to be logged in or to have an account @seedwiki to change the content of the pages.

A problem with www.seedwiki.com is that accounts whose pages aren't modified during 30 days may be deactivated.

It's really great to collaborate with friends or other people you don't know thanks to a wiki website. Even if the technical background isn't perfect, you may really enjoy this experience!!

Do you know the Ig Nobels? They used to award research that should never have been done. Now they award research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think", which is a more PC way of saying it! But they are still very funny.
My favorite one is the 2004 Medecine Ig Nobel. The authors have studied the effect of country music on suicide... They have pursued a lot of statistical analysis and have concluded that even if country music is not the only reason for suicide it probably is a major one! The 2003 Ig Nobel was given to a group for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more developed than those of other citizens...

The awards are given at a ceremony in Harvard. Most of the awarded scientists come and celebrate!